Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve the UK's genomic sequencing capabilities to prepare for a future pandemic.

Alongside the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) COVID-19 genomic sequencing and analysis, the organisation continues to maintain and develop genomic sequencing for gastrointestinal pathogens, tuberculosis, polio and monkeypox. UKHSA will continue to develop a pathogen genomics programme with available resources, to transform and enable wider pathogen analysis and, integration with clinical and public health data analysis to ensure that we are able to detect new, and emerging threats to protect the population and health services.

UKHSA is already engaged in some important global partnerships to ensure we have strong surveillance systems in place. We work with the World Health Organization, the Wellcome Trust and with other public health agencies, and we are supporting the development of a network of hubs to increase surveillance and enhance genomic analysis and awareness. This builds on the success of UKHSA’s New Variant Assessment Platform set up during the pandemic and now working in 14 countries and with six regional collaborators to improve early detection of COVID variants and pathogens of pandemic potential. Further information is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-variant-assessment-platform#overview